The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So then we come to this fifth theme for the in this introduction to Buddhist ethics.

And that is that rather than being ethical as the behavior we do, we are ethical. It's who we are. There's an understanding

in Buddhist ethics and Buddhist practice that as people mature spiritually,

they become ethical, they become someone, and the ethics like the five precepts are not things

that people adhere to or do or think about. they are simply who the person is. The person is someone

who does not intentionally harm others. A person is, their whole constitution is built in such a way that of

course they're not going to take what is not given. They're not going to steal.

They don't have to adhere to a precept.

They, their whole system has kind of been transformed in such a way that there's no

tendency to the greed, to the fear, to the hatred that would lead a person to do unethical things.

And so ethics then doesn't become any kind of outward admonitions.

It's all arising in a sense from the inside, but in such a way that it's not even there's not even

arising of ethics it's just the absence of being unethical.

And so this pointing to how we are is really key to understanding the transformation that Buddhism leads to.

And on the way there, one of the things we want to become increasingly attentive to is how the state of our mind, the state of our emotional

state has a direct bearing on how we live, how we see the world, how we interpret events

that going on, and how, and in that way the ethics we live by.

There's a huge difference between the ethical orientation of someone who is stressed and someone

who is not stressed.

When we're stressed, we're much more likely to cut corners ethically or to be an interest in ethics because we're just

trying to get what we want or survive or to manage ourselves.

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